Director's Spotlight: Derek Cianfrance

The 'Blue Valentine' director talks family, first takes, and a 12-year blessing

Movies are a bitch to make, but Derek Cianfrance may have set some kind of record with the powerful Blue Valentine, starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, about a youthful working-class marriage and its fracture. It took Cianfrance 12 years of rewrites to get it made, but with great ­audience response at both Sundance and Cannes, he's looking on the bright side. "Those 12 years felt like a curse, but in hindsight, it was a blessing," he says. "I think Ryan and Michelle are the only two actors who could play those roles, and back in the '90s, Ryan was on The All New Mickey Mouse Club and Michelle was auditioning for Dawson's Creek."

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Gosling and Williams are extraordinary, but so is Cianfrance. Before dropping out of the University of Colorado, he studied with the late, great avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and he isn't afraid to break with convention: Blue Valentine alternates between film and hi-def video to subtly heighten the contrast between the ­couple's joyous past and their painful present. Your heart cracks not when their marriage does but when you see their younger selves buoyant with hope.

Cianfrance has supported himself by making documentaries, which taught him to trust his instincts—in docs, there are no second takes, he points out, adding that a lot of his first takes in Blue Valentine are in the final cut. For now, family remains Cianfrance's subject: His first feature film was the award-winning sibling drama Brother Tied (1998), and he's currently writing another one about fathers and sons. He talks with pleasure about his own two small boys—"wild, beautiful children," he says with a chuckle—and his wife, Shannon Plumb, whose silent comedies have been screened at the ­Museum of Modern Art. "I'm too serious," he says, "so I'm lucky to be married to a comedian."